Immortal: On this handful of our affections

Immortal

As I get older, and less of a mystery to myself, the list of things in which I find delight has begun to accumulate more slowly. And although I’m of the sort likely to think this decline is because of my own obstinacy, I haven’t ruled out the possibility that, after a lifetime of constant involuntary searching, there are now simply fewer things to find and love. How often over sixty can you be surprised by your own affections? How many times in a life can you turn around and find love for someone or something that you were once indifferent to? It always comes in the form of a discovery, a gift to be unwrapped. After his wife died, Norman Maclean made a late life rally with the writing of the never-actually-completed “Young Men and Fire” which recounts the deaths of twelve young smokejumpers on a wildfire in Montana. In his notes for a frontispiece, Maclean writes: “As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved.” Early in the book, Maclean recalls his own youthful close call of hapless stumbling around in a forest fire, so that it stands to reason that maybe it was Maclean’s empathy and compassion for the young smokejumpers that released this bolt of lightning in his last years. And yet, to the careful reader, the very same pages feel somehow suffused with grief and love for his late wife, although he barely mentions her. Whatever else it was, it was a fire that burned white hot.

If this question hasn’t already been explicitly asked, I put it directly to the reader to consider his or her own inventory of affections, and ascertain with what authority they rule your life, and what’s the meaning of their dominion? Who were you before you discovered them? For me as a boy, it is as simple as asking: Who was I before baseball and fishing? What drove me to climb trees and buildings? Who was it that quietly listened to Wolfman Jack on the transistor radio under the covers at night? And where did they all go? Every one supplanted by other things. For myself, this constellation of my affections came most often in the form of books—in fact, it seems very possible that I was introduced to what I know about delight by the reading of books, though I understand for most people, it is entirely otherwise. And for me too, I remember one early phase in which I fell so much in love with downhill skiing that I drove to the mountains in my parent’s station wagon and slept overnight in the parking lot, so I could ski by myself the whole of the next day. And then, one snowstorm disabused me of my affection so thoroughly, I kicked off my skis, and drove home, never to ski again. I suppose, in the beginning, some of our affections are like the clothes we try on in adolescence, completely unconscious of how ridiculous we look. But then, other acquisitions stay with us for the rest of our lives.

In my experience, it happens like this: one day you are just going about your business, and the next day, a whole family of affinities moves in with you. And just like that, over a single summer when I was sixteen, I read The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This was the summer that divided high school from the rest of life, and I spent the whole of it reading in the attic that was my bedroom. And every few years since, I have reread those books, along with others that I love, as well as the long list of those I undertook just as assiduously and failed to finish. During those early years, I also fell in love with carpentry, rock climbing, and the mountains, as well as a few women. Children arrived to claim my love, theirs by right. I found poetry in my forties. In my fifties, I read Anna Karenina for the first time. I also learned to surf then, and after work I drove the hour to the ocean for many years. It was also in my late fifties that I met the love of my life—in a moment when the errors of adulthood had yanked me suddenly by the collar and made me yearn with an overwhelming passion to be a good woman’s good husband.

Throughout a lifetime, we heap this collection of affections, sometimes with deliberation, but more often haphazardly, as Frost describes: “[We] stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to [us] like burrs where [we] walk in the fields.” And once our collection has proliferated and we approach late middle age, a question begins to form about the future. We wonder in the simplest way, where will these feelings go when their author is no more? This is the question we are afraid to ask because we think we know the answer, and because nothing is harder than to see the world without ourselves in it. In fact, it’s so hard we have to make a kind of compromise with our rebelling imagination: We admit that our own death has an incontestable probability, and yet the extinction of all those feelings that have floated about the nimbus of our existence is even harder to imagine. Where will they go when we are no longer around to hold them like moons around a planet? It seems more likely that they wander off in an aimless search for an orbit than that they actually die with the body. In fact, nothing else seems more likely to survive our demise than these feelings about the things we love, even if we know it is a kind of magical thinking. We imagine them flying off, immortal, escaping the dying animal like spirits or spooks. “Can this be death?” thinks Prince Andrei at the battle of Borodino in War and Peace and “gazes with completely new, envious eyes at the grass, at the wormwood, and at the little stream of smoke curling up from the spinning black ball.” The italics are mine, not Tolstoy’s.

In my sixties, I read for the first time the six volumes of Trollope’s Palliser series, in which duke and politician “Planty Pal” lives out the whole of his awkward, gentle, and inconsequential days. Also about this time, I became obsessed with scrambling mountain peaks and the feeling of being off the trail, alone on a granite ridge with the manageable cognizance of danger for my companion. Retracing my path on those afternoons, wholly fatigued, I would wonder at all the miles I’d surged uphill toward that tiny circle on the topo map. That is the mystery. What was it that pulled me uphill all those hours? Who was I as I went from here to there? I am resigned to the fact, without discontent, that I will never see the world—in truth, I never saw it when I tried to see it. It was always as if from the windows of an Uber. Perhaps, what we don’t see with affection, we hardly see at all. I think it is also probable that I will never read Madame Bovary before I die. Each time that I pick it up, it always ends up across the room on the floor. The older I get, the shorter and sterner becomes my list, and less patient, as if together with the dwindling muscle tissue of old age, there’s some associated sarcopenia of the heart. As if age itself occludes the possibilities, like a shadow over the moon. And isn’t it all, from here on out, one long rescinding? Yes, I suppose—but greater than the fear of death is the fear of dying with a bitter heart. And so, lucky for us, the search is involuntary, things can still be found, and even the miserable usually leave their beds in the morning, just in case. Even now, I can remember the experience of love I thought would kill me, but lo, I was blessed: I can look back now without emotion. Thank you, Lord, for the passing of time! Thank you for my unfeeling heart!

Now, each time I see my wife’s bright eyes and smile, my heart rises with love and lightness—and a gratitude that is the greater the nearer to darkness we proceed. We hold onto each other, not knowing how long we will be permitted, our exact allotment of good fortune. The darker the shadow gets, the more tender becomes our love. Who could have known that death’s shadow, that prospect of nonbeing, could bring us to a tenderness that no eros could ever equal? In her nineties, my mom was struck with a sudden onset Alzheimers that made her believe that my father, her life’s companion for seventy years and her one true love, was a complete stranger. I’m sure the outrageous irony, that was so savage to me, was utterly lost on them. If you had split my ninety-year-old father’s heart with an axe, he couldn’t have been more badly wounded. My mom was moved to the “memory wing” of the assisted living center, where he visited her every day, but she never recovered, and never saw him as anything more than a benevolent stranger. She wished aloud for death everyday. And yet, some kind of interest probably never completely goes, not until the very end—some kind of primal curiosity deserts us and we are ready at last. And when death came for my mother—as a mysterious and benign respiratory problem in the midst of Covid—my dad was already bedridden himself. We had to explain to him the fact of her death, but his acuity was by then so faint, it had to be repeated, cruelly, over and over. Finally, he found his own death in the same bed that he had never left for a year, and their transcendent love story was, in decency, finally transformed into the fable it had always been.

(Dear reader: The next post in two weeks will be a new chapter of the housebuilding memoir. Working Man is 100% AI-free and free to all subscribers. Thank you for your patience. WM)